India seeks Pakistan's help against Islamist terrorists

By Peter Foster and Rahul Bedi in New Delhi

12:01AM GMT 14 Nov 2006

India is facing a growing threat from Islamist terror cells determined to strike at economic targets such as the tech-city of Bangalore and the commercial capital, Bombay, analysts and diplomats have said.

The warning comes after three major attacks in the past year, which culminated in July with the death of 209 people on Bombay's commuter train network.

Today India and Pakistan will resume high-level diplomatic talks that were suspended after the Bombay attacks when India said that it had evidence that a Pakistani-based terror group, Lashkar-e-Toiba, was behind the bombings.

The talks will focus on establishing a Joint Terror Mechanism, which Indian diplomats hope will force Islamabad to tackle the Islamist terror groups which India says are allowed to operate freely on Pakistani soil.

A dossier linking the Bombay bombers with Lashkar is expected to be handed over to the Pakistan delegation as part of what Dr Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has described as a "test" of Islamabad's good intentions.

Related Articles

After decades of confronting Islamist terror in the disputed territory of Kashmir, Indian security analysts now say that the fight has moved south to states such as Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka which are the well-spring of the country's economic revival.

Two weeks ago Indian police arrested two Pakistani nationals in the southern city of Mysore. They were allegedly carrying plans to attack the state secretariat in Bangalore. Security reports later linked the men to another Pakistani jihadist organisation, the Al Badr group.

Yesterday India's airports were put on the highest alert after reports that the FBI had given warning of a threat to hijack a US-bound flight in India.

Terrorism experts say that Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups are working to exploit large populations of socially disenfranchised Indian Muslims who continue to lag behind the majority Hindu population in jobs, education and political representation.

Dipankar Banerjee, the director of New Delhi's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, said: "The combination of outside support from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and inadequate policing in India, is making these groups far more potent than they would be on their own."

Despite some successes, India's counter-terrorism establishment considers that fresh attacks are inevitable in a vast country of 1.1 billion people where millions live outside the net of formal society.

•Members of Pakistan's conservative North West Frontier provincial assembly, which is ruled by an Islamic coalition, voted in favour of creating "a Taliban-style" department to enforce Islamic morality and "promote virtue and eliminate vice". The department will be in control of a police force and will be run by a cleric.